Apple Butter Business

Two weeks ago  I started a campaign on craigslist for canning supplies. Preserving is my cause du-jour at the moment. I am getting super excited about things like canning, fermenting, and dehydrating. Oh the possibilities!

During my quest for free canning supplies, I was contacted by a person that worked for an older gentleman with a plethora of canning business cluttering up his shop since his wife passed on. Boss and I immediately planned a trip out to the nether reaches of the county to pick up our free swag and start the canning fun times.

When we got there, we found the COOLEST gentleman either of us have had the pleasure of meeting since our own grandpa's (who are both extremely awesome mind you). Farmer Jim had not only canning supplies, but an industrial rock tumbler, gads of shiny rocks from all over the US, a stuffed owl and so many amazing handy craft projects I think etsy would blow up if it allowed him to post to their site.

Farmer Jim loaded us up with jars and a canning set up and also sent us home with a HUGE bucket of apples to start off our adventure in canning. Boss now has his old gentleman mentor, and I now have my canning supplies...all in all, a prosperous trip.

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When I got home,  I couldn't decide what it was I wanted to DO with these nifty canning supplies and all of these apples. We are big fans of apple muffins in this house, but it seemed a little silly to make 600 of them just to use up my apples. After a quick offering to the Oracle, it was decided that apple butter would be the coolest thing we could make with the ingredients we already had on hand.

The process begins with a veritable shit ton of apples. We used two bags from the grocery store as well as 10 of Farmer Jim's far superior apples. We filled the crock pot with tiny chunks of apples and thought smugly...this shall make thousands upon thousands of gallons of delicious apple butter! MWHAHAHAHAHA! It of course made...2 pints of delicious apple butter. According to the interwebs, if youw ant to make gallons of the stuff, you will need to keep adding apples as it cooks down and you will need far more than like 30 apples. SO the recipe I am posting here is for a small yield batch that you can do in a weekend with your crock pot. The apple butter purists will do it in gigantic pots over fires and such. I am no apple butter purist.

Let us begin.

Ingredients:

A bunch of of apples (30 or so) -cored and chopped. I leave the skins on because they cook down and it doesn't make any difference to me. Plus...the lazy...

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Why is Mommy Kissing Girls?

This is not my usual blog fodder as you may well notice after about 3 seconds of reading it. I am applying for a blogging job for a queer parenting column and this is my writing sample. I figure, lets kill some birds with some stones and post it here too. If you have anything particularly nasty to say about it, please don't, I'm sensitive.  And as a bonus, a picture of Pinkone!

When it comes to explaining sexuality to children, our own children in particular, it is never going to be comfortable and the choice to simply not deal with these people again is just available to us.  As a later in life queer identified parent, how does one traverse the ever treacherous terrain of coming out to their own children? Every conversation should be tailored to the individual child and family situation, but there are a few universal truths that exist for all of us attempting this particular endeavor.

 Be Discreet

Keep your conversation fact based, and without physical specifics. There is not a child in existence that wants to know the particulars of their parent’s sexual predilections. If there are questions asked, you have the right to tell them that the specifics of your sexual experiences are none of their business but (if you feel comfortable) you can give them a broad overview of the mechanics.

 Model

A common mistake is making a bigger deal out of heavy conversations than needed to. If a kid sees that you are acting guilty, secretive (unless secretive is warranted, in which case explain this to the child) or treating your sexuality as anything less than perfectly valid, they will do the same. Children look to their parents to model behavior and reaction. If we are proud and matter of fact about our sexuality and lifestyle, our children will see that there is simply nothing to be ashamed of and will react similarly.

 Give them Choices-to a degree

They don’t get to choose whether or not we act on our sexuality, it doesn’t work that way, but they can have some choices as to how much they know and who they tell. Kids care about how these changes affect them, so giving them a choice allows them to feel more a part of the decision making process and less helpless in the face of great change. Dad is queer, and that is how it’s going to be, but the kids have the choice as to whether or not they want to tell people in their social spheres about it. Be clear that you are not ashamed and you don’t want them to be either, but it is within their control who, and when they tell about their family situation.

 Answer their questions, all of them.

Answer the questions they ask. If the 5 year old asks her father whether this means he will now be wearing dresses instead of slacks, he should explain his fashion preferences honestly. Some questions will be completely out of the blue, others will be thoughtful and intelligent. The questions will continue to come over the years and will get harder as they get older. All we can do as parents is continue to be honest, give them choices, and answer the questions to the best of our abilities. It is also always okay to say “I just don’t know”.

 Coming out to kids is  emotional and difficult for a parent. The great thing about kids though, they are incredibly resilient. Ultimately, our kids want happy, consistent parents that put their needs first. Coming out may rock the boat a bit, but as parents we are still the anchors. Showing our children that regardless of this new information, we are the same loving, secure and stable forces we have always been will do more to ease the transition than any amount of rational conversation and brand name electronic bribery ever could.

The conundrum of sexuality

I have always been a bit of an amateur cultural and sexual anthropologist, I study the history, cultural themes and variations in sexual pleasure, desire, and action.  I find comfort in the commonality that sex, and in a similar vein, death, provide for every living thing. If we have nothing in common in this life, we can at least say that our lives will be affected by both sex and death at some point.

The choice to abstain, indulge, experience, or limit ones sexual proclivities are the result of a conscious decision and the complete inability to keep sex out of ones life. We are all born of sex and will at one point make a choice about the role sex will play in our lives.

I catch myself often wondering what it is that defines sexuality, is there a board of directors somewhere that assigns sexual orientation around puberty? Does it come in the mail at some point, a notarized certificate to hang in your bedroom, signed sealed and confirmed?

Is sexuality fluid? does a person go through their lives in various states of attraction or disinterest, ebbing and flowing as the years go on? Will what turned me on at 15 turn me on at 30? at 60?  If not, what it is that changes in a person as they age? At 20, do you realize that its leather and whips you need to get off, or does it take some sort of introduction, an eye opening "Ah-Ha Moment" if you will?

I've considered myself some version of queer for most of my adult life, whether you call it greedy, experimental, or trendy, the long and short of it is that i have had equally significant relationships with both men and women in my life.

I have often reflected on what led me to this conclusion, most would probably have guessed that it was a need for attention, or a need to stand out in a world that kind of overlooked brown haired brown eyed chubby white teenagers. Maybe there is some truth to that, I was never a person that liked to blend in and I was always looking to understand the world around me and ask for it to prove its love to me. But is that the final answer? I don't think so, I don't know that finding an answer is really that important, but it doesn't stop me from ruminating on it, I am a naturally analytical person that needs to over think everything I do anyway so thinking on my sexuality is inevitable.

The first woman i truly dated lasted for three or four years off an on,  starting when I had just turned 18.  We met through friends and got to know each other over the Internet, eventually meeting and hooking up pretty quickly.

I was completely enamored with her, intoxicated by the novelty of the relationship, I had never known these feelings, and though I had often suspected, and even orated on the flexibility of sexuality, I had never experienced anything outside of the male, female relationship outside of the occasional kiss with a female friend.

This woman, I am fairly confident that I wasn't in love with her, but I was, at the very least, in love with the idea of her, and the politics that came along with our relationship. Reality or not, she did indeed break my heart.

During this 4 year span I was with other men, most in a casual capacity, and at some point another woman as well, each relationship was complicated and fulfilling in its own way, culminating in my eventual pregnancy and marriage very shortly after my college graduation.

Is Steve my idealized perfect mate? Probably not, do I have an idealized perfect mate? I don't know that I ever gave myself an opportunity to develop that ideal. When I found out I was pregnant, whatever love Steve and I had for each other took a backseat to the reality of our situation and the need to develop a life for our child as quickly as possible.

Do I love him? absolutely. It isn't a question really, the love I have for my husband has grown immeasurably over the last 5 years we have been together and I find that I miss him more when he's away and love him in a more real and simple way than I did back when we were first together and desperately trying to figure out how to make a family out of two mutually exclusive people with only two months of romantic interaction.

I think its this comfort and security in my marriage that has brought me back to my queer leanings, questioning the definition of my own sexuality and what that means for my life and in a larger sense, what sexuality looks like in society today.

Because I am married, and happily monogamous, at least for the time being,  does that mean I'm no longer queer? Does it mean I'm on hiatus? Can a person be queer, in a straight relationship, and maintain a sense of their sexual identify, does that identity change once you make the commitment to spend the rest of your life with one person, regardless of gender?

Where does the line between a desire for pleasure and love and a need for normalcy and stability blur; creating a new reality?

I don't have an answer.  But these things I do know for sure, I love my husband, I love my daughter and my life, and I am queer, whatever that means.

Sexuality...expect this to be a common theme in my writing as its a common theme in my thoughts and musings, and really, what is a blog for but to get those thoughts an musings out into the world so that anyone else who muses on these themes can know they are not alone.